Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official eBook

took place’; and I believe nine-tenths, perhaps
ninety-nine in a hundred, of the Hindoo population
believe implicitly that these accounts were also written.
It is now pretty clear that all these works are of
comparatively recent date, that the great poem of the
Mahabharata could not have been written before the
year 786 of the Christian era, and was probably written
so late as A.D. 1157; that Krishna, if born at
all, must have been born on the 7th of August,
A.D. 600, but was most likely a mere creation of the
imagination to serve the purpose of the Brahmans of
Ujain, in whom the fiction originated; that the other
incarnations were invented about the same time, and
for the same object, though the other persons described
as incarnations were real princes, Parasu Rama, before
Christ 1176, and Rama, born before Christ 961.
In the Mahabharata Krishna is described as fighting
in the same army with Yudhishthira and his four brothers.
Yudhishthira was a real person, who ascended the throne
at Delhi 575 B.C., or 1175 years before the birth
of Krishna.[7] Bentley supposes that the incarnations,
particularly that of Krishna, were invented by the
Brahmans of Ujain with a view to check the progress
of Christianity in that part of the world (see his
historical view of the Hindoo astronomy). That
we find in no history any account of the alarming
progress of Christianity about the time these fables
were written is no proof that Bentley was wrong.[8]

When Monsieur Thevenot was at Agra [in] 1666, the
Christian population was roughly estimated at twenty-five
thousand families. They had all passed away before
it became one of our civil and military stations in
the beginning of the present century, and we might
search history in vain for any mention of them (see
his Travels in India, Part III). One single
prince, well disposed to give Christians encouragement
and employment, might, in a few years, get the same
number around his capital; and it is probable that
the early Christians in India occasionally found such
princes, and gave just cause of alarm to the Brahman
priests, who were then in the infancy of their despotic
power.[9]

During the war with Nepal, in 1814 and 1815,[10] the
division with which I served came upon an extremely
interesting colony of about two thousand Christian
families at Betiya in the Tirhut District, on the
borders of the Tarai forest. This colony had been
created by one man, the Bishop, a Venetian by birth,
under the protection of a small Hindoo prince, the
Raja, of Betiya.[11] This holy man had been some fifty
years among these people, with little or no support
from Europe or from any other quarter. The only
aid he got from the Raja was a pledge that no member
of his Church should be subject to the Purveyance
system, under which the people everywhere suffered
so much,[12] and this pledge the Raja, though a Hindoo,
had never suffered to be violated. There were
men of all trades among them, and they formed one